Posts by Matthew Marlowe

vmware apologists have facts wrong

With reply to Goat Jam: The release was not a Beta. VMware has a completely different release mechanism for betas.

An accurate description of the problem is that VMware forgot to take out the expiration date lockout from a prior beta when they released a general update for all customers, and which all customers of their production software were pushed to upgrade to if they were using the automated update manager. VMware then didn't realize their mistake for several weeks until the timeout occurred. And even worse, gave completely unrealistic fix estimates when informed of the issue (36hrs for a critical patch to an enterprise product is not acceptable).

As for Danial Gold's comments, you are leaving out some other aspects:

- Impacted customers were unable to vmotion across clusters until patches were applied (for any reasonably sized cluster, this is a significant impact).

- There was significant confusion about the production impact of changing the date of the ESX hosts

- Given that VMware was not aware of what was going on until many of their customers were impacted and had expanded significant effort tracking down the cause of vm's being unable to restart, to state that customers should have applied workarounds is completely wrong. VMware didn't publish the workarounds until after many clients had already spent hours trying to figure out what was happening.

In brief, VMware completely screwed up, and their new CEO is exactly right to apologize again.